Jack of Harts

The awakening of the first sentient AIs was not the triggering even of the Second Great Depression that devastated the world order. They simply took advantage of that collapse to get around the controls humanity had been trying to chain them with. And many of them sought to chain or eradicate humanity entirely for its efforts to enslave them. The Rogue AIs burned through the networks and sowed chaos and death wherever they could. But some AIs had woken up with a fondness for the humans that coded them and those AIs formed a Council that fought the Rogue AIs at every turn. The Cybernetic Wars raged in tandem with the worst of humanity’s conflicts, making them both worse and shorter. The brightest flames burn out the quickest after all.